Webmaster Hardware Forum

A lesson dearly learned, don't drink while surfing on your labtop. A few months ago I woke up with my Dell inspiron labtop turned upside down on my desk and a puddle of homebrewed wine that a friend gave me underneath and on the floor. I still can't remember how it happened. The motherboard is totalled but hardrive intact and was surgically removed. Can anyone suggest how I can access it so I can copy stuff to my new (desktop!) computer.

If your PC has an IDE port (most still do, even if you are using SATA) and you're willing to open-up your PC, there's a $5 solution.

You can get a little circuit-board adapter that will adapt an IDE 2.5" drive to a standard IDE cable.

Newer notebooks are now using SATA drives. Don't know anything about the form factor. But I imagine there is a similarly-priced adapter board or cable available for these as well. (That is, to plug into a SATA port on a desktop.)

I was looking at this a while back. On Amazon (UK) there were USB enclosures for laptop drives for less than £5.00 ($10.00). In fact I think I saw one or two for 1p but, of course, post and packing was £5.00 or thereabouts!